Summary
A summary of the content covered in this chapter.
This chapter introduced the basic constructs of Ansible to get started with automating our configurations and state.
We looked into ad-hoc commands and how idempotence makes Ansible powerful. Ad-hoc commands provide a quick and easy way of executing tasks when using Ansible.
We explored some of its use cases:
- Rebooting servers
- Managing services
- Managing files
- Fact gathering
- Connectivity testing
and some handy modules:
file
stat
copy
replace
Debug
The concepts of ad-hoc commands port over to Ansible playbook language.
Playbooks are the basis of configuration management, and orchestrated automation with Ansible
. They are designed for automating repeatable tasks.
We introduced the contents of the playbook:
- Hosts
- Tasks
- Variables
You created and ran your first essential playbook to connect to a remote server, a container, which mimics a ping
module. We will cover more advanced examples in the upcoming chapters.
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